Pega aiming high on India

Alan Trefler
Founder and CEO
Pegasystems  

The Pega DevelopersConference is designed to meet the significant demand for knowledge sharing from the growing community of Pega designers and developers in India and has brought together delegates from some of the world’s largest organizations.  The city of Pearls, Hyderabad witnessed the first edition of Pega Developers Conference 2013 on 27th and 28th of October. The two days long conference was being attended by over 1,700 audiences to understand how Pega momentum building within developer community. The Conference, inaugurated by the leadership team, highlighted the company’s Pega 7 technology and spoke about the significant advancements the technology has made, including how it can help accelerate time-to-market for new applications. A quick chat with Suman Reddy, Vice President and Managing Director Pegasystems revealed many of these aspects besides him giving a brief recap of how the company has been focusing on the Indian market from the very start.

Since how long have you been in India?

We have started our operations in August 2007 in a small business centre before going on to building a small R&D centre in DLF, Hyderabad by hiring about 40 people in 2008. The ecosystem for working of our partners and customers is expected to go up to 12000 by the end of this year.

Do you sell your product or solution through channel?

We have our direct sales model. All of our sales are through our partners who actually take us to the accounts. For example if you look at our partner list, we have a lot of Platinum partners such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Capgemini, Accenture, Vertusa, Tech Mahindra. Globally we have Accenture, Capgemini, IBM etc. We also have many Gold partners.

What about educating partners and how frequently you conduct?

We have a lot of enablement programs that we do across the world to work with our alliances of teams in terms of educating them. It is an ongoing program.We have a channel alliances team spanning all over the geographies where in we work closely with all the partners. We have dedicated people working with partners to constantly indicate them and give them all of the knowledge that is required.

Suman Reddy Vice President and Managing Director Pegasystems

Pegasystems has recently acquired Antenna software, what is the rationale in that move?

If we look at the industry today, we are the world leader in Business Process Management / customer relation Management and case management software. We have our own mobility and social capabilities in the product. The core capabilities that we have in the product are industry leading and industry’s best. So we thought we should invest in mobile, which is the most emerging technology in the enterprise space, decisioning and analytic software and on top of that if you add the mobile aspect of it, then we are basically covering the entire spectrum for what an enterprise might need.

How do you integrate customers in investing into the ecosystem?

Pegasystems has been there since last 30 years, working with the world’s largest and the most sophisticated companies to optimize cost, work in a reduced time to improve productivity and most importantly to increase customer retention. We have demonstrated 5 point increase in customer retention in large companies. Last and not the least optimizing the customer experience and automating the business operations is another main reason why world’s largest companies look to Pega to solve the problems.

Which verticals are currently drawing your attention?

Traditionally Pega has started about 20 years back in financial services, banking, insurance and then in healthcare, Retail, Telecom, Oil and Gas and public sector undertakings. Since that is where large companies are able to leverage the technology and get quick benefits, our recent version of Pega 7 is going to be the next big strategy that we will come up with a product perspective. 

What is your vision for creating the platform of Pega Developers Conference?

The vision is to create a world-class knowledge sharing platform to enable the growing Pega community to get hands-on exposure to our latest technologies. India is a region with immense talent and we are excited to receive such an overwhelming response to the Pega Developers Conference.The participants were delegates from various IT domains such as developers, system integrators, business analysts, project managers from leading IT companies in India.